[With Esolen and Hart Finale, TMC brings the conversation to a close:]
David Hart responds to Anthony Esolen's reply in last night's Hart by the Numbers:
No, that cannot be. It really cannot, and there is not much room here for argument. The capacity of the creature for God is not elevated by sin, nor would our primaeval innocence have been a static condition. In either case, union with God must be a progress from glory to glory, an elevation of the creature to the fulfillment of the divine image within it; and to this nothing can or need give increase. An intellectual creature's innate capacity for God, after all, could not possibly be limited to a specific scope—it must expand towards ever greater knowledge (otherwise it would not be knowledge of God at all, who is infinite and so never conformable to a finite intellectual intention). We are called to contemplate and enter into the life of God himself, and that is not something that admits of fixed degrees. How can the infinite be an "object" of contemplation except through an eternal growth in knowledge?
To think otherwise would also be to say that God's intention for us apart from sin was deficient, that the divine image was not meant to be fulfilled in union with God as perfectly as it might be, and that union with God is an extrinsic accommodation with finite cognition. It would also mean that sin can somehow "enhance" the divine image in us.Look, honestly, there are ten thousand very well worked out arguments on this matter, many of which are there to be found in Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Maximus, Thomas Aquinas...Henri de Lubac (et ceteri). I am not spinning out my own opinions here. And when one understands these arguments, one cannot really dissent from them. To advance the view that you want is to do damage not only to a coherent view of our created nature, but to any proper understanding of the transcendence of God's goodness.
I really must end the conversation here, I fear; I am well past a deadline already.
Oh, but I must add one more observation on the Pelican. You do appreciate, I hope, that even the cross of Christ would not reveal to us the true nature of divine love were it not for the resurrection. In itself, death is not a sign, but only death thus assumed, thus conquered, and thus imitated. The pelican—that mighty sign of God's goodness—would reveal something true about God simply by virtue of its pelicanity in any possible world. This is actually quite important.
Anthony Esolen has his final say:
David Hart justly warns us against any easy and sentimental belief that it was, after all, good that Adam sinned. Scripture is unequivocal about this, as it is about what Hart calls the absurdity and brutality of our fallen world.Sin cannot elevate the capacity of the creature for God. Nor, as he says, would our primeval innocence have been static. What exactly it would have been is the subject of great speculation on the part of theologians; but unless God had created Adam in vain, Adam's fulfillment must have been attainable only in the contemplation of God himself.
It was not clear to Thomas, however, that even the desire for union, rather than communion, with God—the sharing of the very life of the Trinity that David so eloquently speaks of—was present by nature in Adam: "Eternal life is a good exceeding the proportion of created nature, as likewise it exceeds its knowledge and desire, according to 1 Cor. 2:9: 'Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither has it entered into the heart of man.'" Thus, when we're talking about our capacity for blessedness—"capacity" is Thomas's word— we are talking about two things: "Duplex capacitas attendi potest in humana natura." One, he says, is the capacity we possess by nature, and this, says Thomas, God fills accordingly, as he does for every created thing. But the other is the capacity we possess by the divine will, that is by grace; and this indeed may be increased, nor is it to be considered a defect if God wills not to increase it (Summa Theol. III, q.1, a.3).
Thomas is answering the false assertion that the Son had to become man, even had Adam not sinned; otherwise, the argument goes, a capacity for blessedness in Adam would have remained unfulfilled, since, after Adam, and after the Incarnation, fallen man now has the blessings of grace. Now Thomas does not reply that Adam was no recipient of grace, nor does he imply that Adam's state would have remained what it was; about the details of such a providential economy, as it would have unfolded, we have no witness. But Thomas does hold open the possibility of the felix culpa: "There is nothing to prevent human nature's being raised up to something greater [i.e., than it had been in Adam], even after sin; God permits evil in order to draw forth from it some greater good (Nihil autem prohibet ad aliquid maius humanam naturam productam esse post peccatum: Deus enim permittit mala fieri ut inde aliquid melius eliciat). Thus Saint Paul says, 'Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more'; and the Exsultet of the Paschal Feast sings, 'O happy fault, which gained for us so great a redeemer!'"
Thinking of such grace, then, Francis de Sales can say, with a tad more assurance than Thomas says it but with no heresy, that "our ruin has been to our advantage, since human nature in fact has received greater graces by the redemption wrought by its Savior than it would ever have received from Adam's innocence even if he had persevered therein." (Treatise on the Love of God).
Professor Hart's language describing the rush of being lifted or embraced more and more deeply into the life of God, from glory to glory, with ever expanding knowledge, is as glorious as that of any prose writer I know, and is Dantesque in its ardor and sweep. He is right, Paradise must be so! Nor would I wish to think of our "capacity" for blessedness rather as a pint pot or a gallon jug. But even in mathematics there are orders of infinity. Grant that man's natural capacity for blessedness is infinite (because it is the infinite God who will fulfill it), it does not then follow that grace cannot raise that capacity, nor does it follow that there cannot be "degrees" of blessedness, if by "degrees" we are talking not of finite numbers but of ranks and hierarchies of endless (and endlessly deepening) bliss. Such degrees, from one blessed soul to the next, imply no defect in God's goodness, no more than is implied by the fact that men are not seraphim, and seraphim are not cherubim. Thomas follows the Fathers in interpreting "In my Father's house there are many mansions" as asserting such "degrees"—not fixed capacities, but still degrees, or "gradus," to use his term (Suppl. 93, art. 2; and for the inequality of the blessed, and the diversity of their blessedness, see Summa Contra Gentiles 3.58).
Sometimes Thomas uses the language of "closeness" to describe these orders: "Quanto aliquis erit Deo magis coniunctus, tanto erit beatior" "The more closely one is conjoined with God, the more of blessedness will one enjoy." (Suppl. 93, art. 3). This closeness is a consequence of charity, itself a gift of God's grace.
I agree with Professor Hart about the worthy pelican's showing forth his Creator in his natural pelicanity, original sin or no; and of course if the Cross signifies anything, or by means of anything, it is the victory of the Resurrection. But we have ventured far from the original discussion about suffering. I am not committed to the "strong" version of the felix culpa, as comforting as I have found it. May God one day show me whether it was true. I am grateful to David for his patience and his exertions in this discussion, which have helped me at least sort out my thoughts and feelings at this time, and I wish to join him in the wholehearted reverence he advises. We suffer; God is just and good. Let us not make light of the suffering. Let us place our hope in Christ, and be silent.
And David Hart, responding, brings this discussion to a close:
There may be some obiter dictum in Thomas's discussion of the question of infralapsarian incarnation that would alter my view of him; I will consult your references. Incidentally, Aquinas is wrong—the incarnation is the premise of creation, with or without sin. But that is another argument.Posted by Clifton at January 7, 2005 06:31 AM | TrackBackIn any event, Francis de Sales is speaking nonsense, and in fact rather silly nonsense, and if we had many many days to spend on the topic I might be able to convince you. I don't mean to sound dismissive, but there is a level of technicality that this entire discussion invites that makes this an unappealing project.
I will make only three closing observations:
1) Logically, the end for which an intellectual creature is intended—even though that end be supernatural and gratuitous—is the perfection of its nature in the highest good, which is to say union with God. It would indeed be a deficient creative act of God were he to will in the creature anything short of the consummate perfection of that union proper to the creature in its divinized state (in, that is, the condition of grace). To imagine that for a creature created in the divine image there could be a sufficient natural fulfillment proportionate to the creature's capacity that is anything less than the supernatural elevation of his nature to the highest knowledge of God is to fail to grasp what it means to be created in the divine image. Without final grace, human "nature" cannot be complete. True, Aquinas would not seem to agree; though Henri de Lubac is very good at showing that in fact he does. Also, God wills the highest good possible for his creatures because he must: not to do so would be to fail to will the infinite goodness of his own essence (which is the sole "real" object of his will) in the reditio of all created things to him.
2) The mathematical model of greater and lesser infinities is not germane here, obviously, inasmuch as the question is one of finite consciousness of the infinite simplicity of God, not one concerning the size of a set. As God is infinite, and cannot therefore be the object of a finite intuition proportioned to eidetic consciousness, the vision of God must always be of the same simplicity—communicated by grace—ever more deeply apprehended, without surcease, term, or limits. If this is the end to which rational creation is called, it becomes meaningless to speak of greater and lesser graces. God's very being is manifestation of his essence in his Logos, in the light of his Spirit, and our being as logikoi is to be joined in perfect living knowledge of the Logos, which can mean only one thing. Divinization is not an extrinsic accommodation between two objects set over against one another: it literally is our eternal act of "becoming God," which is not something that comes in greater and lesser versions. A mathematical model of the infinite is a philosophical red herring here. Better to discuss Husserl's discussions of intuitions following from an infinite intention, or Henri de Lubac's treatment (better than Marechal's or Rahner's I think) of how the prior orientation of God's infinity is the ground of all finite consciousness, even of finite things.
3) Whether one wants to accept it or not, the simple and incontrovertible truth is that, if sin can lead to a greater grace than would otherwise have been available, then sin and evil are positive elements of the divine will, of created nature, and even of the divine nature: there is no other actus in which creation participates, and so if evil can even occasion an increase in the good, then evil has real being and must participate in God. And since God is infinite goodness, and wills his own goodness infinitely, and since a higher good could be accomplished by means of evil, then we must believe God does in some sense will evil, and that evil therefore resides in the divine essence. I doubt you are following my argument here, as this really requires about 200 pages, and it is 1:18 a.m. as I write this; but what I am saying is simply correct. Either you believe in the privatio boni view of evil (and so in the convertibility of all the ontological transcendentals with the divine essence), or you do not; only in the latter case can you assert the "hard" version of the felix culpa, though you can no longer believe God or subsistent being is goodness as such.
Look, there are varying levels of theological discourse, I know. To my mind, all talk of the felix culpa remains always on the homiletic plane, where it does some good perhaps. I am only a student of classical Christian metaphysics and you could not pay me to give a sermon; within that metaphysical tradition, the notion that we will profit from evil more than we would have done from innocence is not only morally problematic, but renders Christian ontology and any coherently Christian understanding of God impossible.
Please, though, we have said enough.